


the meaning of our hands

by sinagtala (strikinglight)



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Awkward Romance, F/M, Pre-Canon, Tea Ceremony, Unresolved Romantic Tension, after a fashion anyway - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 12:37:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11253342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/sinagtala
Summary: “Will you not drink with me?”“Milady will allow it?”Azura hums in the back of her throat, soft and chiding. “Don’t be silly. You must want a cup, if only to stay warm.”





	the meaning of our hands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [merewiowing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merewiowing/gifts).



> For Colette, as ever, and always!
> 
> Prompt: "things you said at 1AM." This should honestly be subtitled "Kaze overthinks everything." Or, "Kaze freaks out about the slightest hand-touch (and so do I)."

It’s the voice of the wind that wakes them both, the frost-bitten groaning wind that gusts down to Shirasagi from the north. Because neither of them have ever been easy sleepers to begin with, they find each other at the kitchen door—Azura clutching the collar of her bedrobe close around her throat with one pale hand, Kaze with his scarf wound up around his head and over his mouth and nose. When all is said and done he’s bundled up more from habit than from the cold; winter is never bitter, never cruel, down here. Winter in Shirasagi never slices to the quick like a blade, as Kaze remembers the winters of his childhood doing, in a village cut into the side of a mountain, far more remote than this. The sort of place with more space for the dark to settle between the houses, stealing the flames from lanterns and braziers and firepits, bringing the snow down on everything like a shroud. The sort of place where the nights are so black and so wild it’s entirely possible to lose your way and walk off the mountain’s edge—to tumble out into the frigid air and fall, and fall.

Azura tells him, when Kaze mentions this to her as he lights the brazier and sets the kettle on for tea, that she’s known places with winters like that, fierce and cutting as he describes. Though this night is gentle in comparison—just the windborne chill to contend with, where it creeps in through cracks in the shutters, and a light dusting of snow they know will melt away at dawn—she accepted his scarf all the same when he offered it, hugging it around herself, perhaps less for warmth than for protection from whatever shadows still follow her throughout these long hours.

The scarf is big on him and even bigger on her, easily looped twice around her narrow shoulders with length to spare, but strangely enough she carries it. It must have to do with the way she carries herself, Kaze thinks, poised without so much as a hint of a slouch, even with no one watching, as naturally as drawing breath.

And, if he allows himself this tiny measure of honesty, that’s one thing that’s never stopped being strange to him: how at home Azura looks, kneeling on the tatami and watching as the coals in the brazier glow red and the water in the kettle bubbles to a boil. So strange to see her awake past midnight with his scarf around her shoulders, when everything from the way she speaks and sits and stands to the fine silvery embroidery on her robes tells him she should not be here, that she does not belong beside him, or perhaps the other way around. His sense of his own place—in this castle, in the world—runs deep and strong, and nothing he’s told himself has quite been able to make him believe that he’s not dreaming when she talks to him, when she beckons him to sit by her, closer than even the royal princes dare.

The strangeness claws at the pit of Kaze’s stomach, try as he might to banish it. The thought follows him, has dogged his footsteps from the first time they ever spoke alone together. More and more so, with the turn of each season.

Surely, he tells himself, any day now she’ll grow tired of his company. Surely she can’t truly be _happy_ , here—

Surely, surely, it must be wrong to want it—to want her to reach out and take that happiness from his hand, when he’s been taught not to want, and knows he has nothing to give.

“The water is ready,” he says, stretching out his hands to take the kettle from the coals. “A cup, if you would, milady. And the teapot.”

Azura nods and passes him one cup from the tray arrayed on the table, then a second, her fingertips on the backs of his hands light as butterflies, scorching as the water as it steams down from the kettle’s spout. “You’re proficient, Suzukaze.”

“Milady is too kind,” Kaze tells her, his answering smile a small secret thing she might not even see in the half-light. “I’m only doing as I was taught.”

Which is to say that the process should be easy enough—the water needs to be brought to a boil and then cooled before brewing, poured first into the cups, then from the cups to the pot. The tea leaves are best kept loose during the steeping. It’s supposed to be easy; he’s _not_ supposed to be watching her watch his hands, follow the slow path her eyes trace across the floor to where he lifts the first cup, cradles it in his fingertips, careful not to tremble lest the water slosh out over the rim and burn him, and stain the floor.

Like fallen leaves, these hands, humble and faded and not at all worthy of her. Which he shouldn’t even need to say, because Azura may have brought ice for his head the day he fell from the new stallion he was meant to be breaking, may have asked especially for him to accompany her into town on the day of the Harvest Festival, may have saved him the ripest and the sweetest of her basketful of fresh peaches last market day, but even past all of these things, Kaze still has no idea what any of it means. Azura knows how to find him in whatever shadow he tries to hide in, but she holds her peace and keeps her secrets, and who is he to ask for answers? He cannot know if it does make her happy, truly, to let him near like this—

—as happy as it makes him to be near her. So, _so_ happy, he doesn’t dare say it—

“It’s beautiful,” she says, as he pours her cup. Laughs, as he slides it across the floor for her to drink.

He doesn’t need to taste it to know it’s a good tea, brewed just so, the pale green of spring leaves and still faintly steaming, soft filaments winding upward until they dissipate in the air. He is almost proud, almost laughs to see it—except that she is already laughing, and the sound and sight of it take all the breath from his body.

“Will you not drink with me?”

“Milady will allow it?”

Azura hums in the back of her throat, soft and chiding. “Don’t be silly. You must want a cup, if only to stay warm.”

 _I want to make you laugh for the rest of my life_ , he almost says. Catches himself. _I want—_

“Oh, stop, Kaze,” she says, though he hasn’t said anything that warrants a scolding. And then she is bending forward, hands out for the pot and for the empty cup. “Let me.”

He almost doesn’t let her. He almost reaches out for those hands—stills them, catches them between his own, almost says her name aloud, _no, please, milady. Azura. Azura, Azura, I’m not—_

Kaze knows he doesn’t want her to stop. So he sits frozen, chilled to the bone, watching her rehearse the movements like a dance. Lift, pour, lower the pot, offer the cup. Go further and place the cup in his hands, close her fingers around his as if to say he has no choice.

The wind knocks at the shutters, in the silence Kaze allows to fall between them. Kaze listens to it and to the sound of his blood rising and beating in his ears, and all he can think about is to look away, press his mouth shut, not say another word about how much he wants—what?

“Drink with me,” Azura says. She could command him like this and he’d obey, but then she has to turn it into a question. “Won’t you, please?”

Kaze blinks. He’s been staring down at the mats, never quite seeing them, but her words pull at him and he drops with a start back into his body, on his knees on the kitchen floor. And Azura doesn’t let go—indeed, closes her fingers tighter like she’s trying to collect all the warmth in the room, give it to him, make him take it.

“You really want me to?” he asks, his voice no more than an airy, wonderstruck whisper, like he’s not sure he should even breathe this thought.

“Of course I do,” Azura tells him. “Tonight, and tomorrow night.” She hesitates, suddenly shy, and looks up at him through the fall of her hair. “And any night that you’ll want to, I will.”

It feels like a vow. Azura says that she does, and that she will, and the words shake Kaze to the heart of him, bubble over inside him until he’s smiling, bright as day. And the wind outside seems to slow to a murmur as Azura smiles back, and Kaze’s hands stay warm even after she releases them.

“To you,” she says. They lift their cups—fingers curled, lips to porcelain—and, together, drink.


End file.
